Choi Auditorium

About the Panelists

Sam Bergen '04 is the chief marketing officer at Illumination, shepherding The Super Mario Bros. Movie to a worldwide box office of $1.36 billion earlier this year. He is currently preparing for the launch of Migration this December and for Despicable Me 4 next July. Prior to joining Illumination in December 2020, Bergen was vice president of global brand creative for Beats by Dre, built Vice Media’s West Coast office, and was CMO for Omnicom. At Oxy, Bergen majored in cognitive science with a minor in film. 

WHAT I HEARD: LIVING THROUGH L.A.'S RACISTS TAPES SCANDAL
by Mike Bonin, Los Angeles City Councilmember (retired), Leadership in Government Fellow, Open Society Foundations

Since 2012, Mali has grappled with governance, sovereignty, and human security crises. Despite holding multi-party elections for two decades, the nation has seen three coups in just over ten years and still faces persistent insurgencies.

In this talk, Professor Jaimie Bleck will delve into the views of Mali's urban youth on these significant governance challenges. Based on discussions from 66 focus groups with informal city youth clubs, known as "grinw," she will focus on the youth's perspective for resolving the present crises.

After graduating from Harvard as the first person in the school’s history to study both astronomy and mythology, Dr. Moiya McTier earned her PhD in astrophysics at Columbia University where she was selected as a National Science Foundation research fellow. Moiya has consulted with companies like Disney and PBS on their fictional worlds, helped design exhibits for the New York Hall of Science, and given hundreds of talks about science around the globe (including features on MSNBC, NPR, and NowThis News). 

There will be a 6pm reception preceding the talk.

There is a related arts workshop with Crawley on Feb. 17.

Williams' "Brown Up Your Feed" project, iterated as a radio hour, lecture, discussion space, performance space, and theoretical framework, brings to attention an array of interwoven studies and interventions, inspecting and addressing racial hegemonies as they manifest in online spaces.

Ever practical, Mandy dissects everyday online behavior and the algorithms that enforce it and encourages attendees to generate and implement a cognizant response to these sometimes
inviting, and sometimes insidious technologies.

How is it possible for history to have sidelined seven full decades of early African American organizing? In this talk, attendees will learn about an ongoing campaign for Black rights which served as the prequel to the NAACP, Civil Rights, and Black Lives Matter movements. From 1830 through the beginning of the 20th century, free, fugitive, and freed Black Americans held multi-day “Colored Conventions” all across North America.

Joey Soloway is one of the most prominent non-binary creators in Hollywood.